At a recent garage sale, I found some volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Nobody wanted it because they get information online.  First published in 1768 it was the premier reference work, before giving up print in 2010. The online version competes with the larger and more popular Wikipedia, which is generally considered less reliable. The […]

This week a post on the Jack the Ripper Forums asked if people thought there were too many coincidences in the case. I don’t, but it got me thinking about coincidences in writing. Some fiction and television shows use coincidence as a plot device and are considered unrealistic. Yet coincidences do happen in real life. […]

The latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine contains several features on John Nathan-Turner, producer of the show between 1979 and 1989. One interesting fact is that only three of the writers used in his tenure had written for Doctor Who before and, at least ten had never written for television before. Usually you would expect […]

On 27 September 1888 the Central News Agency received a letter signed by Jack the Ripper. Addressed Dear Boss and dated two days earlier it was not the first letter to claim responsibility for the series of murders in the East End but was the first to give the unidentified killer the name by which […]

Writing is the easy part. Finding a home for your work is more difficult. That’s why I, like many other writers of short fiction, are indebted to those who find and list the markets for those. There are three sources that I frequently use. The first is Submission Grinder. As of today, it has details […]

Recently I narrated a podcast for the first time in Rippercast’s Cast of Thousands series.  In the first of two parts I expand on my article about Doctor John Morgan Hopkins and his son-in-law John Rees. In 1888 whilst his wife, the illegitimate daughter of Dr. Hopkins was awaiting trial for murder, Rees claimed that […]

This week I was shocked and saddened to hear that Terrance Dicks had died at the age of 84 . Terrance was a beyond prolific writer, best known for his work on Doctor Who. He contributed scripts between 1969 and 1983, was script-editor through the Jon Pertwee era, adapted over sixty stories into books, and […]

This week I had another minor victory in my research into the identity of Jack the Ripper’s final victim, who called herself Mary Jane Kelly. Over several years I have compiled a list of over 663 possible candidates from historical records. Gradually I am trying to trace each individual after 1888, the year that Mary […]

This week I found a good idea on facebook. A writer posted his intention to submit a short story to a magazine every day for a month. Simple and effective. Most writers have folders full of unpublished stories. Some were rejected, others not yet perfected, and a few waiting to find the right home. We put […]